Three Films Make A Post: Murder is so 1987.

Apparently it’s “movies I liked a lot more than the critical consensus” week this late October around here, as these three films prove.

Pet Sematary: Bloodlines (2023): So yes, I did indeed like Lindsey Anderson Beer’s prequel to the (horrible) Pet Sematary Remake quite a bit. Not as a logical extension of that other movie’s world, nor of that of the novel (one of Stephen King’s very best, if you ask me), but as a very atmospheric horror movie that may not treat its tale about the horrors of familial responsibility with any subtlety, but certainly knows what it is talking about. A palpable sense of dread and doom runs through much of the film, and an acceptance of that dread and doom by the older generation as a fact of life, a feeling that’s occasionally broken by downright nasty violence of the type that really doesn’t care whether characters deserve what happens to them. The third act becomes a bit unfocussed for my tastes, but otherwise, this is the only Pet Sematary movie I genuinely like.

V/H/S/85 (2023): This entry in the traditional bro horror anthology series is not terribly bro at all anymore. In fact, most of the segments, as directed by David Bruckner, Scott Derrickson, Natasha Kermani, Mike P. Nelson and Gigi Saul Guerrero, seem rather more interested in doing cool things with the POV horror set-up of the series. I thought Derrickson’s “Dreamkill” was a particularly strong entry – as well as a nice sibling piece to The Black Phone – with some particularly clever use of found footage as parts of its plot, but there’s not a single segment here that doesn’t do something clever, or freakish, or interesting with its part of the anthology.

Totally Killer (2023): Back to the Future+Happy Death Day+The Final Girls=Totally Killer, and strangely enough, I’m perfectly okay with the equation of Nahnatchka Khan’s movie. More than okay, actually, for I found this slasher time travel comedy often surprisingly funny (the great comical timing of particularly Kiernan Shipka helps a lot there), the jokes never getting so meta-genre I’d lose patience with them, even though there’s a lot of genre consciousness visible during the slasher bits. The emotional beats hit very well as well, so much so that I’d suggest this bit of horror arithmetic has some actual heart.

In short: Hellraiser (2022)

Sort-of clean addict’s Riley (Odessa A’zion) decision to follow the plan of her criminal non-mastermind boyfriend to steal something that will turn out to be the Lament Configuration (New Edition) leads to madness and death (mostly death, though) for everyone involved, including her half-estranged brother.

I was rather looking forward to David Bruckner’s version of Hellraiser, given how much I enjoyed – well, I say “enjoyed” but you know what I mean – his The Ritual and The Night House. Alas, the actual film leaves me completely cold. While there are some scenes that are memorable as high technical accomplishments on a design and effects level – just take that van sequence as an example – there’s an abstract, passionless and sexless quality to all of it that is completely at odds with the material and its thematic connotations. It’s a film about obsessions, sex, violence and all combinations thereof where nobody ever seems all that obsessed (even passionate) about anything; perversion’s a cenobite that looks a bit like it was made with the action figure foremost in mind. Bruckner’s usual thematic main concern – the combination of grief and guilt – does appear again, but in comparison with his earlier films, its treatment is so superficial it borders on the offensive.

But then, the character going through the grief is not really a character, but a flat cliché version of a young woman down on her luck, as lifeless at her core as the rest of the film. Turning the cenobites into aggressive tempter figures is not such a great idea either, bringing them much too close to the been there done that of the classic devil, taking away from the feeling of mystery and the uncanny. (And yes, I know, some of the Hellraiser comics did this as well, but those were mostly terrible, so don’t seem to be the greatest source to me).

There is simply no reason for this to be two hours long – the characters are certainly not complex enough to need scenes and scenes of build-up with them, and there’s simply not enough plot to fill the spaces between set pieces.

Three Films Make A Post: Terror goes into over-time.

Home Invasion (2016): Despite being a direct-to-video production, director David Tennant’s Home Invasion looks and feels more like a TV movie, the sort of thing Lifetime gets up to from time to time, say. So the film doesn’t take the violence or the threat to its central characters very far and plays things rather safe and friendly for a home invasion movie, building up competent enough thrills but not exactly telling a riveting story. It also wastes Scott Adkins as the least interesting bad guy available, generally opting for stilted dialogue and little else whenever it can get away with it. Natasha Henstridge and child actor Liam Dickinson are okay, but the film plays the threat for their lives and limbs so conservatively, I found myself less than excited.

Mandrake (2010): Tripp Reed’s Mandrake for its part actually is a TV movie. Just another SyFy Original, this one’s concerned with an “expedition” (or as we in the biz call them, annoying people wandering through the jungles of Shreveport) that pulls out the wrong dagger from the wrong chest and has to contend with the resulting awakening of a very pissed-off ent (whose name probably would be Grumpyroot or something of that kind). For most of the time, this plays out like the adaptation of a second string Weird Tales story, with its same basic adventure tropes (including the usual bullshit about “natives”, though they aren’t exactly the bad guys here; in fact, punchier writing could have made something quite interesting out of the way they aren’t), the same somewhat cool monster, and the same pleasantly clichéd plot structure.

Additional selling point is that our heroes seem to be surprisingly okay with human sacrifice as long as they aren’t on the wrong end of the dagger. Obviously, I enjoyed the whole she-bang well enough, but who am I kidding?

Southbound (2015): Given how many of the people involved with this anthology horror piece concerning the misadventures of various soon-to-be-dead (or worse) characters travelling southbound on a nameless US desert highway have been part of the VHS films, I was rather expecting an unpleasant trip into the world of bro horror.
Instead, I got a pretty good horror anthology with some truly nasty bits, with rather simple yet very effectively realized short tales, and a sense of weirdness floating around the edges of the stories that to me is pretty much the opposite of bro´horror, like Twilight Zone episodes gone horribly wrong. It’s a delightful show case for all the directors – Roxanne Benjamin, David Bruckner, Patrick Horvath and collective Radio Silence – that also suggests they were rather held back by the VHS films’ paradigm to look really shitty.